Monday, August 22, 2011

What Ever Happened to Freya?

In Norse mythology, Freya is a goddess of love and fertility, and the most beautiful and propitious of the goddesses. She is the patron goddess of crops and birth, the symbol of sensuality and was called upon in matters of love. She loves music, spring and flowers, and is particularly fond of the elves (fairies). Freya is one of the foremost goddesses of the Vanir.

How can you not love a god who is fond of eleves?

Where has Freya gone now that nobody believes in her any more? Did she die? Is she buried somewhere?

These are important questions because there are hundreds of extinct gods and we don't know what's happened to them. Jerry Coyne tries to come up with an answer [Where are all the dead gods?] but I fear that his knowledge of religion isn't sufficient for such a complex topic.

Maybe we should ask one of those sophisticated Christians that we hear so much about?

Don't you just love it when those sophisticated Christians teach us about sophisticated science? Perhaps he would do better if he got another degree. So far he only has a Ph.D. (Philosophy) and a Doctor of Theology (Th.D.). Poor old Jerry Coyne only has a single Ph.D. (under Richard Lewontin). Jerry is completely outclassed in the sophisticated department but I bet he wears better boots!

13 comments
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Difficult to know what to say to that load of garbage.But two things come thru with crystal clarity. He doesn't bother about getting his facts right (about the kindest thing I could say) and his logical faculties are seriously deficient.

It's easy to demonstrate the speed of light as a constant; you simply need two precise, synchronized clocks. Send a time signature from clock A to clock B (on a satellite, or on the Moon, say), and have B send the time signature of its reception back to A. A then records the time of receipt. If time difference A:B is different from B:A, Craig has a point. If not, he's simply fog-darting for God.

That's the difference between science and religion. Religion HAS to work from faith. Science is all about THINKING of ways NOT to have to do that in the first place.

You don't have to take it on faith you're not a brain in a jar; the evidence of our senses is inconsistent with the idea on the face of it. It's possible to doubt that evidence, but unless it's done on the basis of other, more credible evidence, there's no reason to believe the suggestion we're just brains in a jar is more persuasive, or even equally credible, with the reality we do know, operate within, and interact with consistently every moment of our lives.

A very poor showing by Craig. He pretends that Coyne's piece was written in anger by reading it in an angry voice, then plays word games with "religion" vs. "faith," then moves on to his "Jesus is real" schtick. That's about all I could listen to.

The great thing about the ancient astronaut theory and the appearance of "GODS" is that it does not require anything supernatural. To my mind this is completely compatible with evolution theory and should appeal to evolutionists.

If you research this subject you may well come to see how much is explained by the arrival of ancient astronauts on planet earth and their influence.

I lost my keys, and fairies stealing them from me while I sleep totally explains that. It also explains all the other missing things which people swear they didn't misplace. Fairies can totally just be species we have not yet discovered, there's nothing supernatural about them.

If you research this subject you may well come to see how much is explained by the existence of fairies and their influence.

The great thing about the ancient astronaut theory and the appearance of "GODS" is that it does not require anything supernatural. To my mind this is completely compatible with evolution theory and should appeal to evolutionists.

If you research this subject you may well come to see how much is explained by the arrival of ancient astronauts on planet earth and their influence.

Like your other - ahem - theories, you are content to stop thinking when you get to one remove from a particular issue. The origin of human intelligence? Tinkering by a 'brainy biosphere', with no requirement to explain the origin or mode of operation of that. Likewise, astronauts ... apart from the extreme difficulty of such creatures getting across incomprehensibly vast swathes of empty space (how close together can we expect life-bearing solar systems to be, roughly?), it merely places the 'origin' question on a different planet from our own.

They Came From Elsewhere ... problem solved; no need for a meta-explanation!

I don't understand. Why do you react so strongly to this? He was saying that there is historical evidence for Jesus existing. So science v.s. religion is not contrary. How is that something you cannot listen to? Do you just listen to what you want to hear.

Laurence A. Moran

Larry Moran is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Toronto. You can contact him by looking up his email address on the University of Toronto website.

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The Sandwalk is the path behind the home of Charles Darwin where he used to walk every day, thinking about science. You can see the path in the woods in the upper left-hand corner of this image.

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Quotations

The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me to be so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.Charles Darwin (c1880)Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine. It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as "plan of creation," "unity of design," etc., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact. Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject the theory.

Charles Darwin (1859)Science reveals where religion conceals. Where religion purports to explain, it actually resorts to tautology. To assert that "God did it" is no more than an admission of ignorance dressed deceitfully as an explanation...

Quotations

The world is not inhabited exclusively by fools, and when a subject arouses intense interest, as this one has, something other than semantics is usually at stake.
Stephen Jay Gould (1982)
I have championed contingency, and will continue to do so, because its large realm and legitimate claims have been so poorly attended by evolutionary scientists who cannot discern the beat of this different drummer while their brains and ears remain tuned to only the sounds of general theory.
Stephen Jay Gould (2002) p.1339
The essence of Darwinism lies in its claim that natural selection creates the fit. Variation is ubiquitous and random in direction. It supplies raw material only. Natural selection directs the course of evolutionary change.
Stephen Jay Gould (1977)
Rudyard Kipling asked how the leopard got its spots, the rhino its wrinkled skin. He called his answers "just-so stories." When evolutionists try to explain form and behavior, they also tell just-so stories—and the agent is natural selection. Virtuosity in invention replaces testability as the criterion for acceptance.
Stephen Jay Gould (1980)
Since 'change of gene frequencies in populations' is the 'official' definition of evolution, randomness has transgressed Darwin's border and asserted itself as an agent of evolutionary change.
Stephen Jay Gould (1983) p.335
The first commandment for all versions of NOMA might be summarized by stating: "Thou shalt not mix the magisteria by claiming that God directly ordains important events in the history of nature by special interference knowable only through revelation and not accessible to science." In common parlance, we refer to such special interference as "miracle"—operationally defined as a unique and temporary suspension of natural law to reorder the facts of nature by divine fiat.
Stephen Jay Gould (1999) p.84

Quotations

My own view is that conclusions about the evolution of human behavior should be based on research at least as rigorous as that used in studying nonhuman animals. And if you read the animal behavior journals, you'll see that this requirement sets the bar pretty high, so that many assertions about evolutionary psychology sink without a trace.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution Is TrueI once made the remark that two things disappeared in 1990: one was communism, the other was biochemistry and that only one of them should be allowed to come back.

Sydney Brenner
TIBS Dec. 2000
It is naïve to think that if a species' environment changes the species must adapt or else become extinct.... Just as a changed environment need not set in motion selection for new adaptations, new adaptations may evolve in an unchanging environment if new mutations arise that are superior to any pre-existing variations

Douglas Futuyma
One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist.

Francis Crick
There will be no difficulty in computers being adapted to biology. There will be luddites. But they will be buried.

Sydney Brenner
An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: 'I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.' I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist

Richard Dawkins
Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understand it. I mean philosophers, social scientists, and so on. While in fact very few people understand it, actually as it stands, even as it stood when Darwin expressed it, and even less as we now may be able to understand it in biology.

Jacques Monod
The false view of evolution as a process of global optimizing has been applied literally by engineers who, taken in by a mistaken metaphor, have attempted to find globally optimal solutions to design problems by writing programs that model evolution by natural selection.